6/5//2010                 around 1,800 words

Contemporary Art and Public Opinion

By Marilu Knode

Executive Director, Laumeier Sculpture Park and

Aronson Endowed Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Missouri-St. Louis

http://marilu-knode.blogspot.com/

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I blame Joseph Beuys.

The modernist art world became accidentally democratic again when Joseph Beuys declared “everyone is an artist.”

Beuys did not mean that everyone is a visual artist, acting within the “high modernist” field of museums. He did not mean that the general public should be exercising sway over the product of teachers, curators and arts academics.

He did mean, however, that that every citizen should be creative in his or her own field. Based on his own biography and subsequent artistic practice, Beuys did mean that artistic gestures exist everywhere in the world, and that we should all be mindful and appreciative of them. Critique could exist, certainly, if it came from common purpose and good will for changes that might result. The idea—that everyone is an artist—was a challenge for citizens to take control of their own creative lives.

In the context of a devastated post-World War II Germany, Beuys was exhorting the public to resist totalitarian thought and the type of nationalistic frenzy that drove the world into a war. Beuys believed that cultural production allowed for political independence. Fifty years after Beuys’ declaration, we have nothing but creative public expression and commentary on everything under the sun. Through newly available media, like blogs, Facebook and Twitter, anyone is allowed to make public commentary.

Some of this commentary is cultural in nature, but has it come with, as Beuys hoped, a stake in the products of culture?  How does public commentary affect the people being critiqued? Is non-expert commentary just “Monday-morning quarterbacking”1  or can it only be aimed at products with similar amateur roots? 1 Does any field, other than the arts, change its behavior based on non-specialist critique?

Beuys was right: everyone should live more creatively in his or her own world. Perhaps Beuys was reacting to the professionalization of the art world, which began to install professional degrees as gauges for artistic accomplishment. Beuys was a member of the Green Party in Germany, which is dedicated to a democratic, anti-big government platform. He taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which eschews grades and is based on self-directed creative education. Despite his wish for democratic artistic culture, while his performative mementos continue to inspire artists, his larger project baffles the general public.

The question is: To what degree should artists and arts organizations take public opinion into consideration when making aesthetic or programmatic decisions? Over the past two decades, museum practice has changed enormously, and several generations of artists have worked within more popular forms of culture in order to critique those commercial forms. Many examples of dynamic, democratic artistic practice abound in community-based programs from San Francisco to Singapore, from Los Angeles to Teheran. Artists resist official support or censure as well as the commercialization of public space in order to create a sense of place and community. These forms of art have evolved in response to the availability of new media and based on the social mores of its practitioners, and celebrate a place-based practice in real time.

Yet the public continues to reject this type of non-material artistic practice. When surveyed the public generally prefers painting and sculpture to performance and installation.

There is a significant gap in what we in the professional art world are doing relative to public opinion, yet there are numerous examples of institutions trying to bridge that gap. Museums have instituted multiple forms of public engagement and outreach through free docent tours, extensive educational materials and wall texts, by pricing catalogues so inexpensively that they do not cover the cost of printing, to lectures in schools and other expansive modes of communication.

Below are some examples of how public opinion has affected professional artistic discourse. Ultimately, everyone is free to make art, just as they are free to start their own museum.

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Museums today have a new mission: to provide experiences and services that rival the democratic forums of the Internet and discos. One way to get entice public engagement is setting out a public comment book for exhibitions. This type of feedback generally produces two kinds of comments: “this show sucks” and “this show inspired me.” New on-line museum interfaces allow visitors to slide a bar towards a smiley face to indicate their degree of “like”—but this is more marketing than true interaction.

Are either of these methods true interaction generating exchange? When an expert talks to an amateur, do we truly reach some form of enlightenment for either side? Rarely is there a real opportunity for thoughtful public commentary or real exchange, since there is never a museum person present to engage in dialogue. Museum websites are pr outlets, not a site for curatorial dialogue.

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One project that promises to turn the curatorial keys to the public is the Wolfsonian-Florida International University’s 2011 project This Belongs in a Museum©. Residents of South Miami Beach will be solicited to submit their choice of objects from the South Miami Beach area that should be in a museum. These volunteer curators will be asked to consider the intention of the creator and the role design played in the object’s creation. Images of the submissions will be posted on the outside of the museum’s building, making further opportunities for public commentary.

It will be impossible to gauge the impact this show will have on the public, yet this does not make the exercise fruitless. This is an on-going dialogue and comes from an institution driven by the value of knowledge generated through artistic experimentation.

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Some exemplary, public, democratic museums include the Acid Blotter “museum” in the home of Mark McCloud, San Francisco. McCloud has been collecting deactivated acid art for several decades. His expertise comes from his own drug history, and includes two rough brushes with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) Only rarely do the police get involved in cultural places—such as when art is deemed pornographic or potentially dangerous—and McCloud’s space resists authoritative control in order to preserve this countercultural remnant. 2

The touristy Smiley Face Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is based on the highly commercial symbol designed by Harvey R. Ball in 1963. This pop culture icon demonstrated how design and advertising became the new monetized social landscape. This instantly recognizable symbol makes for a kitschy museum, but without any context around them, this museum devolves into a tourist trap.

It may be structurally impossible for museums to be truly democratic. The process of organizing shows, raising money and cultivating artists and donors requires expertise, an expertise lacking in the Smiley Face Museum.

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There are other interesting examples of a cultural democratization driven by a combination of expert and non-expert collaboration. Former dealer / current museum director Jeffrey Deitch tried to break down the elitism of the professional art world by creating a reality tv show based on artistic competition. “ARTSTAR”, which ran on Gallery HD tv in 2006, started with 400 contestants and winnowed the diverse group down to eight. Unlike “Project Runway,” the Art Stars rarely made art, which would have allowed the audience to gauge their skills; and unlike “American Idol”, the public was not invited to vote someone off the island. Sadly, the program likely reinforced the worst type of clichés about the art world. Art cannot compare to the dramatics of “Survival.”

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One television show that does deliver access and education is the “Antiques Roadshow”, produced by the Public Broadcasting Service. Each week, fine and decorative arts experts travel to cities around the United States appraising objects d’art buried in attics. Only the very best (and sometimes worst!) objects are put on television, with appraisers parsing out values based on the shape of nail heads, the cultural significance of a beat-up child’s doll or the sheer rarity of a forgotten masterpiece. This show demonstrates that anyone can have great objects of culture in their own homes, and puts expertise where the public understands it—next to money.

I propose two contradictory examples of vibrant artist engagement with the public.

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The first is Anthony Gormely’s 2009 project One & Other for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Rather than making his own art even more ubiquitous in the UK, Gormely gave his plinth over to the public. Anyone could enter the on-line lottery and, for one hour, perform, recite, narrate or just simply stand atop this highly public and political spot. Gormely did a democratic thing: he gave a voice directly to the people.

One of the lottery winners was Scott Illman, who dressed as a traditional town crier. In today’s world, a town crier might express popular condemnation of an unpopular war. Despite his admirably elaborate historical costume, Illman instead used his time to promote the bar he owns. Gormely surely knew that some of the people who won the lottery would use it for a commercial purpose, but that is the difficult thing about democracy—there’s no controlling it.

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Perhaps the most relevant work to the topic of public input into the professional art world is

Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid’s 1995 project where they wondered: what would art look like if produced by public consensus? They began a series of paintings, the Most Wanted and Least Wanted, based on American tastes (they later expanded their survey globally; Spain was not included in their poll).

The original survey, of 1001 adults, was conducted by Martilla & Kiley, Inc. The USA Most Wanted painting is genre mishmash of representative clichés that includes religious and historical figures, kids and baby animals. In his statement about the on-line project, hosted by the DIA Foundation, then-DIA director Michael Govan stated:

“In an age where opinion polls and market research invade almost every aspect of our "democratic/consumer" society (with the notable exception of art), Komar and Melamid's project poses relevant questions that an art-interested public, and society in general often fail to ask: What would art look like if it were to please the greatest number of people? Or conversely: What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls?” 3

Komar & Melamid’s project was ironic on many levels. The artists emigrated from the Soviet Union before the wall came down, and their works flayed alive the representative icons of a Soviet dictatorship. In Most Wanted and Least Wanted, they used the tools of the West’s pr machine to find out if capitalism was any better at developing creative symbols to inspire people.

The resulting paintings are inconclusive. It seems that the particulars of place allows every nation a specific aesthetic development.  What Komar & Melamid proved, however, is that taste congeals with people who have similar education and histories.

What the project proves thought is that what we, in the contemporary professional art world, value is at odds with what the general public wants. The contemporary, modernist art world has its own history, stars, goals and support structure. Perhaps the bottom line is that something as fleeting as artistic value cannot be dictated by non-experts. Do the New York Yankees get rid of a player because the fans don’t like him, or because he isn’t performing to their needs? I would argue only ever because of the latter.

Art is at a disadvantage with the public. Almost every kid takes sports in school; few take art. I don’t believe we’ll achieve Beuys’ democratic cultural goals when there is such an educational imbalance.

I do think artists and museums want public feedback, but they expect that feedback to be somewhat informed, certainly sympathetic, even better if it is curious and not hostile.

Perhaps the problem is not with the public but with our expectations of growing our audiences. There may be a finite audience for the arts just the way there is a finite audience for astrophysics. Expert language necessarily excludes amateurs, why would art dialogue be any different?

Funny enough, Beuys was right. The thing that most endangers the contemporary professional art field is the D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) movement, where everyone is an artist.

Perhaps the real issue with public engagement in contemporary art is this: everyone can be an artist, but not everyone can be a critic.